Clint Smith

Clint Smith is the author of How the Word Is Passed, as well as an award-winning poet and a graduate of Harvard University’s PhD in Education program. Since the text is primarily told through the lens of the author’s experience, Smith plays an important role in shaping the reader’s perceptions of the sites he visits and the people he meets. In this way, Smith’s book blends academic research with memoir and deeply personal reflection, making him both author and character within his own work.

Thomas Jefferson

One of the Founding Fathers of the United States and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson also served two terms as president, from 1801 to 1804, and 1805 to 1809. Smith delves into Jefferson’s past as a slave owner who, despite his own reservations about slavery’s morality, willfully participated in the institution of slavery and believed that the Black race was physiologically inferior to the white race.

Sally Hemings

Sally Hemings was an enslaved woman owned by Thomas Jefferson and largely believed to have been his long-term mistress after the death of Jefferson’s wife in 1782. It is also believed that Hemings bore six of Jefferson’s children, although the truth around the children’s parentage and Hemings’s relationship with Jefferson himself was purposefully obfuscated to maintain Jefferson’s reputation and legacy.

Niya Bates

Niya Bates is Monticello’s director of African American history and was the director of the Getting Word oral history project at the time Smith interviewed her.

Charles Deslondes

Deslondes was a mixed-race slave driver at the Whitney Plantation who led a slave revolt in January 1811. The revolt was one of the largest in US history, composed of hundreds of slaves, but was ultimately put down within forty-eight hours by federal troops and white militiamen, who brutally murdered Deslondes and many of his allies.

Commodore Shaw

The Commander of the New Orleans naval station at the time of the 1811 German Coast Uprising, Shaw was notable for his swift and brutal suppression of the revolting slaves.

Yvonne Holden

Holden is the director of operations for the Whitney Plantation and has direct family ties to the plantation’s history.

John Cummings

Cummings is a successful real-estate magnate and lawyer whose approximate net worth sits in the multimillions. After acquiring the Whitney Plantation as an investment property for his portfolio, Cummings became fascinated with reconciling himself with the disturbing history of the plantation and resolved to turn the site into a museum that would centre the Black experience of the antebellum South.

Norris Henderson

Henderson is a prison reform advocate who was wrongfully incarcerated at Angola Prison for twenty-seven years. While in jail, Henderson began to advocate against the brutality and racism embedded in the American legal system and is now a vocal spokesperson for many organizations, including Vote of the Experienced and the Formerly Incarcerated Convicted People and Families Movement.

Samuel Lawrence James

An acting Major for the Confederates during the Civil War, James purchased two plantations in the wake of the Union victory—one of which was the Angola Plantation. James was then awarded the contract for running Louisiana’s prisons and had direct ownership of convicts’ labor, which he leased out in a for-profit operation to many companies, in a model not dissimilar to pre-war slavery.

Sons of the Confederate Veterans (SCV)

The SCV is a nonprofit run by the descendants of Confederate soldiers who fought in the Civil War.

United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC)

Founded in 1894 to promote the values of white supremacy and memorialize fallen Confederate soldiers, the UDC now distance themselves from organizations like...